we have a winner!

so...I found my first turtle nest today!

It poured buckets yesterday and this morning, so a) I was soaking wet by 9AM and b) it washed away all the tracks/nest marks that turtles had left this weekend and c) terrapins like to nest right after it rains. Not only did I see the telltale tracks, but I was able to see & dig up the nests too! It's pretty cool, I'll put up a picture once I get a digital camera (which will be, um, soon?).

The nest starts about 4" below the ground surface, and is flask-shaped, so when you're digging the first way you find it is when this little hole 4" under the ground caves in and your finger pokes through the little hole and into the bigger opening (the "egg chamber"). Then you excavate a little more and inside the egg chamber are usually about 9-14 1.25" long, .75" diameter eggs that look...well, kinda like light pink rugby balls is the best way I can describe it, I guess. Blunt ends, not like a chicken egg. When they're freshly laid, they're pink; after about 24 hours they turn white and once they turn white you can't handle them anymore because the baby turtles have started to develop inside and you don't want to scramble them. The shells are leathery, and easy to bend/break, not like a bird egg. Then you dig up the eggs and count them and mass them and record lots of data (but only if they're pink do you count/mass them, of course). Then you put them back, mark the nest with flags, recover the nest with dirt, and put mesh on it to keep out the predators.

We found 6 nests today, 5 of which predators hadn't gotten to yet. It was pretty cool, to learn how to follow more cryptic turtle tracks and see what I'm actually looking for and find the nests. Last week I had a couple days where I saw tracks and I dug and dug and couldn't find the nests no matter what, so finding these today felt pretty good.

Cool things I saw today:
- A 5 foot long, 2" diameter banded water snake that I nearly stepped on and I'm surprised didn't bite me
- A willet nest I almost stepped on (I was looking too hard for turtle tracks, I guess)
-Turtle nests!
- An osprey catch a fish and fly away with it in his talons